If you think that e-books are helping the environment, you could be wrong. According to researchers, there is an "incredible amount of energy required to successfully pay for, download, and open the e-book":

"Particularly using the Adobe scheme, we found that to download a 2 megabyte e-book required a user actively participating in various logins, registrations, and downloads for an average of 12 hours, resulting in an average of 173.2 megabytes of data transfer," explained Arther, "Boiling all that down to kilowatt hours of energy shows that e-books consume approximately 18 times the fossil fuel of an equivalent published work."

This is not an April joke it seems (edit: well perhaps I should give that a second thought, *shame*). 173.2 MB to download an e-book?? Could someone explain? Perhaps I am missing something in that story...